Cantabile 4025 which is available now has a new feature “Exclude from Pre-load” which you can use to exclude certain songs from the pre-loading of the set list.
Some notes:
If a rack is only used from songs that are excluded, it too will be excluded. If any non-excluded song references a rack, the rack will be loaded.
When the set list is pre-loaded, and a non-excluded, non-active song is modified and you switch it excluded you’ll be prompted whether to save the song.
You can exclude/unexclude multiple songs by multiple select + right click.
The alpha is out for testing, and it is rather stable :-). I have used it for about a month for rehearsals, and only had a few issues, and nothing serious. Be aware that it is mainly the GUI engine that have had a major overhaul, so nothing has changed in the sound engine, i.e. there will be something in the GUI that may not be as expected, but don’t expect drop-outs or any other weird unexpected stuff.
If I had tested a version through a couple of rehearsals I wouldn’t mind trying a gig on one of the new versions - just a) don’t upgrade after the rehearsals, and b) don’t do it at your high-profiled come-back show at Wembley.
And just tested 4025, and can confirm that my two reported issues - crash when selecting audio driver and Editor Visibility not working - has been resolved. Nice - I downgraded to 4019 (audio engine selector crash was introduced in 4020) and got really confused because some issues resolved in later versions suddenly reappeared, I forgot that I was back on the early version.
Cantabile 4 will officially be released as beta very soon… (just awaiting confirmation of a couple of other fixes and pending no other reported issues).
The rack where I noticed the issue works fine with the Exclude From Linked Clones setting, but I just noticed that other racks with just the Editor Visibility marked (not being excluded or anything) behaves weird. I’ll need to test a little more, but something seemed odd. I’ll try to restore backups in case something was altered because of the other issue, to see if that makes a difference.
Just so I’m clear, does excluding songs from pre-load help with computer resources? Does it help with computer RAM being used or am I missing something?
That’s correct (in most cases). Pre-loading a set list grants you almost instantaneous loading times at the expense of memory consumption. The new feature gives the user more control over this trade off. For example, if you have one song in your playlist that runs many (unshared) Omnisphere instances and consumes substantially more memory than other songs, it might be a good idea to exclude this song. This would indeed free up a lot of RAM when the set list is pre-loaded. However, loading this song will obviously take longer, which might be ok for some songs.
Just don’t exclude light-weight songs or songs that share most of their memory with other songs in the set list (via linked racks).
This feature is also something i’ve been waiting for, for my use case:
I’ve got 100 or so songs that i pull from for a 1-hour solo set. I typically pick 16-20 songs as my planned set and move them to the top of a copy of my master set list, leaving the other 80 or so songs for requests (or whatever i get inspired to throw in). With the new feature i can preload just the 16-20 planned songs for instant loading, and leave the others to be individually loaded as needed.
I was playing with the thought of creating one giant monolithic song with many of my common presets as a fallback for when I need to improvise something on the spot. It’s great that I can just slap it at the end of the set list without worrying about it’s memory footprint.
